Brownie's Back to Give Expertise on Wildfires

Laugh of the day....former FEMA chief "Heckuva Job, Brownie" Michael Brown has sent out a press release announcing he's available for interviews on the California wildfires.

Michael D. Brown, Former FEMA Director and Current Director of Cotton Companies, one of the leading disaster preparedness and restoration organizations in the nation, is available for comment regarding the wild fires that are devastating Southern California.

.... Mr. Brown can speak to the turmoil being caused by the California wild fires as well as to some of the new processes in disaster relief efforts that will help to restore California communities. He can offer advice to residents and businesses on proper relief and recovery efforts and provide suggestions for future disaster preparedness.

choking off development of science/scientific managment skills and personnel;

inadequate and improperly allocated budget;

over-reliance on private contractors.

Sound familiar?

In this regard, trotting out Brownie* to give us his expertise is perfectly appropriate, because his administration of FEMA epitomizes the hackery still going on, and will help to highlight that nothing, nothing has changed since Katrina.

It's more disaster capitalism run rampant. Only this time the people being evacuated are white and reliably vote Republican, so when they get to the football stadium, they get cascades of food and water, cots trucked in by the thousands, massages and aromatherapy, and no Blackwater mercenaries or NOLA cops gunning them down for being on the wrong overpass....

FEMA acknowledged that in Miami-Dade County and in other areas of the state, however, the agency took the rare step, given the magnitude of the disaster, of awarding $726 in "expedited" housing assistance to people who asked for it, without immediately sending inspectors to verify damage.
In a Sept. 13 memo to Gov. Bush and other top state officials, Orlando J. Cabrera, executive director of the Florida Housing Finance Corp. and a member of the governor's Hurricane Housing Work Group, wrote after a meeting with FEMA that the agency was allocating short-term rental assistance to "everyone who needs it, without asking for much information of any kind."
Other so-called "standard housing assistance," of up to $25,600, he wrote, is "liberally provided without significant scrutiny of the request made during the initial months; scrutiny increases remarkably and the package is far more stringent after an unspecified time."
Even state officials were surprised at how quickly money flowed to Florida.

MSNBC was comparing the superior FEMA response to the wildfires in California with the Katrina debacle, and they had the nerve to call up Michael Brown on the phone so he could defend himself, apparently in the interests of fairness, as if he deserves the opportunity to defend the indefensible.

And of course, ever the Lachey punk of the Bush administration, he took the opportunity to bash Governor Blanco and vaunt the superiority of Governor Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in these situations. I thought I was going to gag.

I absolutely despise this weasel, he represents the worst type of incompetent bureaucratic slime this country has to offer, and if I should ever meet him in person, I'm going to whip it out and urinate all over him. Consider yourself warned worm. :-)

CBS News has learned a task force of agencies, including the FBI, ATF, the Orange County Sheriff's Office and the California Department of Forestry will announce shortly that the massive Santiago Canyon Fire - which has caused an estimated $10 million in damage - is being officially declared an arson, and a $50,000 reward is being offered to find the arsonist.

Let's not get diverted from the main points - the bogus, shoddy diversion of resources and thought from preparing for the inevitable fires, and the cockamamie way the current administration runs everything (except its grafting).

And, FWIW, if it's arson, it could just as easily be a disaster capitalist contractor looking to drum up business. Once profit, unbridled by law, becomes the only measure of relevance, then setting a fire to be in position to get government business putting out the fire becomes acceptable - because in a purely-profit-driven world, anything that makes for a profit opportunity is OK.

But Beck is not a diversion from this story. He supports, and therefore bears responsibility for all the heckova jobbers and the misplaced corrupt policies that made NOLA and this disaster spin out of control.

Orange County Fire Chief Chip Prather told reporters that firefighters' lives were threatened because too few crews were on the ground. He said a quick deployment of aircraft could have corralled a massive blaze near Irvine.

"It is an absolute fact: Had we had more air resources, we would have been able to control this fire," he said.